Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Event 3: Fowler Museum Masa, Robots and Androids

I am very happy that I attended this event because of the interesting topic discussed which was the research projects of robots and androids in Japan that are very advanced and amazing! The first thing we talked about was the definition of some robots/androids that were very helpful guiding what kind of robots were being shown in each different project. There were three types such as Humanoids that are robots that are in shape of a human being, Android that is a robot that looks and moves like a human being, and geminoid that is a copy of an actual human being. There were examples such as, Bishop android that were shown in the movies Alien 3 that were robots that had a figure of a human being, therefore, able to perform tasks that actual human beings aren't able to accomplish. It showed a ripped in half human being(robot) with fake guts everywhere which was awesome and disturbing to see because you can never see that in real life with the human being still fully responsive.
There was a project that Masa was involved with which was the Telenoid which is a teleoperated robot that is from the ATR Hiroshi Ishiguro Lab which was a very small robot that was in shape of an infant, and anyone was able to interact with it by hugging it, etc. It was very cool to see one of the first works of a robot representing a human being by walking, talking, etc. with Elektro, which was a giant robot who was able to talk for itself and explain stories in relation to represent a human with these characteristics, Elektro was given some sort of personality that was one of the first to be given this sort of work.
There were plenty of example of these different kind of robots that scratched the surface of artificial intelligence with interviews with robots with the ability to think for itself which was cool and scary at the same time because it was asked a very dark question followed with a dark answer that everyone hopes that robots don't take over the world with evil instead of the hope of helpful robots. I would love for artificial intelligent robots to help in the future and I'm sure they will, but I hope it doesn't get to the poient where it becomes dangerous because they want more things perhaps power or control which could put the human race in danger. There were little projects such as pepper which is a humanoid robot that is capable of recognizing regular human emotions that I think is pretty damn interesting and amazing for a robot to be able to so such a thing.
The project of Hiroshi Ishiguro making a replica of himself in human form with a robot was insane because his kid and wife were brought in to interact with it and the kid thought it was very creepy because like Masa said once you are in there, no matter if you know you are going into the same room as a humanoid, there is still this feeling of tension since it's a robot in a human form which is weird because humans aren't used to these type of interactions.It's amazing what technology could do and I can't wait for the future to see how advanced technology gets.